Petersburg singer-songwriter releases 'All the Bones'

A few weeks ago, Petersburg singer-songwriter Sarah C. Hanson Hofstetter released her sixth album, All the Bones, a 14-song collection of original work now available on Bandcamp. The song writing has been in development for over ten years, and the recordings took shape over roughly a year of recording sessions in Petersburg with local musician Matthew Wintersteen, followed by a spring break trip to Anchorage where engineer Kurt Reimann of Surreal Studios helped complete the record.

Sarah has been writing songs since she was 20, when a friend showed her a few chords on guitar and she realized the instrument she had assumed was beyond her reach was actually attainable. Learning the guitar and finding her singing voice created a platform where she could perform the poetry she loved to write and share. She traces her inspiration as a poet to her grandmother, Mary Jones, a memoirist who filled small books with the special moments of life she found worth capturing.

"We have all these books of short stories that she wrote, and they're delightful," Hofstetter said.

Like her grandmother before her, Sarah notices the moments that get her thinking, and sometimes those notions grow into songs.

"When something suggests something ... I just sing, I just sing things, and sometimes the song keeps singing, and sometimes the song feels like it just has a lot in it," she said. "I'm always listening for that ... what is coming to me, what is filtering down into my system that sounds right. I'm always listening for what sounds right."

Building the bones of the album

About a year before the album's completion, Hofstetter and Wintersteen set aside a week over spring break 2025 to begin tracking. Wintersteen plays bass and has a deep interest in recording engineering.

The sessions focused on building what Hofstetter calls "the bones" - guitar, lead vocals, and bass, recorded to a click track – good sturdy bones onto which more layers of sound or other instruments or musicians could be added.

Wintersteen developed a recording technique that became central to the album's sound: looping short sections of a passage so Hofstetter could sing against them continuously and layer self-harmonies on top of one another. On one song about a boat running aground, she used the approach to stack three distinct vocal characters - one low and heavy, one fragile, one she described as a "sea lion mermaid woman" - voices layering the same line.

"It felt so rich to me," she said.

Wintersteen plays bass on nearly every track. After the spring break week, the two met several more times through the year to refine the vocal tracks. By the time she was ready to head to Anchorage this past spring break, 12 songs had guitar, vocals, and bass laid down. She added two banjo songs - new compositions - once she arrived at the Anchorage studio.

Sarah had hoped to finish the album entirely in Petersburg. But - much like years earlier, when she had planned a natural delivery of her daughter Hahnah at a birthing center and at the end had to go to Anchorage's Providence Hospital to complete the delivery – to close out this album she had to take it to Anchorage.

Finishing it at Surreal Studios

Reiman's Surreal Studios is located in downtown Anchorage. Sarah had worked with him once before, to record her fourth album about 18 years earlier.

Sarah describes Reiman as a "quilter" - someone who can identify a brief moment in a performance that is exactly right, loop it, and stitch together fragments into something seamless. For songs where she struggled to lock into the steady tempo of a click track without losing the emotional feel of the piece, that approach was a relief.

He also contributed musically. Reiman plays xylophone on several songs - an instrument he doesn't bring out often, and Sarah says she appreciated very much. The sessions produced some unconventional percussion as well. For the song about a boat hitting bottom, Hofstetter struck a large coffee tin with a felt mallet to capture the impact sound she heard in her head. Her son Joe, who traveled to the studio with her, performs egg shaker on another track and appears in the liner notes. Reiman also had Sarah scratch a toothpick across a fragment of meteorite and incorporated that sound into the recording.

The studio itself left an impression -it was a stimulating environment, she said, and also at times a vulnerable one. "I felt both empowered and also completely at the mercy of things," she said. Part of that vulnerability was simply the act of hearing your voice on tape and choosing to release it anyway.

The songs

All the Bones opens with "Wilder Now," which Sarah describes as a love letter to finding her footing in Petersburg, where she has lived for about eight years. "Little observations about different places in the town, these tendrils going out until I just had this web of, like, I'm here," she said.

Other songs include the beautifully melancholy "Dusty Day," written in a single sitting, and "Now I Sail" which features the layered self-harmonies she and Wintersteen built together. "Well Met," her most recently written song, took on a shimmering reverb quality in Anchorage that Sarah loved and asked Reiman to develop further - the two worked out a staggered sequence of soft vocal layers that build across the song.

The album title reflects the language she used throughout the making of it. "The bones" was her word for the skeletal tracks - guitar, voice - from which everything else grew.

All the Bones is available to stream or download on

Bandcamp, Sarahchanson.bandcamp.com/album/all-the-bones. Sarah plans to eventually make the album available through CD Baby and on Spotify as well, and has ordered a limited run of CD copies. She's might release a vinyl edition as well.

Editor's note: This story has been modified from its original version published on June 11, 2026, to apply some minor corrections.